Tuesday 7th April 2009

Hello again everyone,
The last couple of weeks have been really busy as usual, but also really quite surreal too!

(Before I get started I should attach a small health warning to this email. There will be some strong language, sexual references and absolute proof that men are evil nasty arseholes. My apologies about the foul language – there’s plenty more to come, so anyone likely to be offended may want to stop reading! I have edited my list of recipients so hopefully anyone likely to be really offended will get sent an alternative, less-offensive version of this email!)

First things first, (I’ll start off with the unoffensive bits!) 2009 is a very interesting year, as I’ve just discovered. I watched a documentary the other day about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which I think is the largest oil spill North America has ever seen, although I don’t know if it was the biggest in the world. This year is the 20th anniversary, and just last year the people of Valdez finally got their settlement from Exxon – £12,000 per person after 20 years of fighting, and they’re still living with the aftermath.

Then directly after the documentary was an item on the news saying that this year, on April 15th, it will be the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. For those of you who don’t know what that was, Hillsborough is a football stadium in Sheffield where, on April 15th 1989, 96 people were crushed to death at the start of a football game, and over 700 people were injured.
It’s a particularly sensitive issue here in Liverpool, as all of the fans who died were Liverpool supporters (it happened on their side of the stadium). When I looked more closely into what had happened, I found out some interesting things, like the fact that this year, at 15.06 on the 15th, all the buses and trains in Liverpool will stop for 2 minutes of silence to mark the anniversary.

Even more interesting was a little side-story about the Sun newspaper. (Again, for those of you who don’t know, the Sun is a particularly cheap and tacky tabloid). A day or two after the disaster, The Sun printed a front page story called “The Truth” in which they claimed that the Liverpool fans had robbed and abused the dead bodies, urinated on paramedics and generally behaved appallingly. Almost all of the other eye-witness accounts said the opposite, that most of the uninjured fans were helping to carry out the injured and hurt, and the Sun not only got it very wrong (and famously refused to apologise or retract the article), but it was such an awful thing to even suggest, that it caused a massive backlash.
Almost all Liverpool newsagents refused to stock the Sun from that day on, and to this day, 20 years later, it’s almost impossible to find a copy of the Sun in Liverpool (which is actually quite a refreshing thought!).

All these things got me thinking that 1989 was a big year history. 20 years ago this year was the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Hillsborough Disaster, Tiananmen Square in Beijing (what do you even call that? A protest A disaster? A massacre?), and of course the Berlin wall came down that year too.

I couldn’t think of any other major events that happened in 1989, but your suggestions are welcome!

So, moving on from historical events I’ll tell you all about my surreal magnetic powers and why men are evil scum-sucking bastards.

As many of you know, I have believed for a long time that I have a slightly abnormal magnetic field in my body, that causes electrical appliances to break down whenever I get too close (so far, I have destroyed several computers, an electric lawnmower, two microwaves, and several small items like phones and digital cameras etc).

Anyway, I’ve never had a problem with clocks, until this week! It was the weirdest thing – first my digital alarm clock suddenly reset itself, claiming it was 19.46 on June 5th, when it was actually mid-afternoon in April!
Then my ipod clock reset itself the next day, jumping ahead about 9 hours. And then I went swimming, and when I got changed afterwards I noticed that my watch had stopped at the exact time I took it off and put it in the locker to get in the pool. I reset it, it worked fine all day, and the next morning at the pool it did it again! It stopped at exactly the time I took it off to go swimming, and I had to reset it again – and then it was fine!
It was a bit creepy! The clock on my phone also suddenly changed, but that one was less sinister, as I remembered later on that I had dropped my phone and the battery fell out, so it’s no surprise the clock was wrong!

So, a little weird and eerie interlude in the middle of this week – between Tuesday and Friday, all of my clocks systematically stopped, but they are now all working fine again!
Very strange!
I always used to think that I was a bit of a technophobe, but now I think I might be an accidental Luddite – a technology-destroyer!

I also handed in my last essay on Friday, so we are now officially done with classes, and just have the dissertation to go! I should find out by the end of next week whether or not I can go to Sudan, or possibly Liberia, and if not I’ll have to stay in Liverpool (sad face!).

So, moving on to the delightful world of the clearly inferior sex……

Last weekend I flew to Paris to visit a nice french guy I had met in Lyon, who had invited me over to Paris to stay with him and have a fun weekend. It was all planned and booked back in January, but he waited until three days before my flight to call me and let me know that he’s started seeing someone else, and she might come and join us for the weekend too.
I had three days to work my way through shock, rage, frustration, depression and acceptance, but I was basically not a very happy bunny! My friends told me not to go, but I couldn’t get a refund on my ticket and really wanted to have a nice weekend in Paris!
In the end the new girlfriend didn’t show up, and I still managed to have a nice time sightseeing in Paris, but it was pretty awkward and I felt like an idiot for actually thinking he was a nice guy.

Then on Saturday night, my friends J and Dee and I went out, and had a great night, despite meeting sleazy guy after sleazy guy. We had almost given up hope, when we met a couple of really nice guys from London, just up for the Grand National (I did put a couple of bets on, but didn’t win sadly). It turned out they were really nice, and funny (they were accountants, but they preferred to tell people they were dolphin-trainers instead!), and pretty good-looking too.
Dee, J and I chatted with them for a while, and then J invited them back to her house (Dee and I were staying at hers anyway) for a drink. We all got a cab over to hers, and had a few drinks and chatted away. It got really late, and one guy, Steve, got a bit creepy and kept feeling up Dee, which she didn’t like much, but the other guy Nick was lovely and polite and sweet (or so I thought!).
Eventually at about 4.30am we were tired and wanted to go to bed, but they didn’t take the hints to leave, so we just called them a cab and said they’d have to walk down onto the street to wait for it!
Nick asked for my number, which I gave him, but I had actually turned my phone off as I had no battery left.
They finally left around 5am, and we went to bed.

The next morning when I turned my phone on, I had a message from Nick, which he’d sent at 4.30am, while they were still in the flat, saying (look away now if you’re easily offended! I’ve bleeped out the actual words, but it’s still pretty nasty!):

“I really wanted to ram my ***** up your tight little *****”

Ugghhhh!!!!!!!!
What horrible, nasty, sleazy disgusting thing to say!!!!!

I am so glad my phone was off, because if I had got that while they were still in the flat, I’d have felt REALLY freaked out, and also may have punched him in the face.
And HE was the nicest guy we had met all night!! He seemed so polite and normal and nice, and uuugghhhhh!!!!

I don’t know what on earth I said or did to make him think that was an acceptable thing to say – I mean I try to look nice when I go out, but I don’t think I dress like a whore or anything! Eeeeewwww, and the word “ram” is particularly offensive and violent and nasty – God what a total fucking ARSEHOLE!!!

Sorry about all the swearing, but I seriously thought he seemed like a perfectly normal, nice guy (he was a bloody accountant from London for Christ’s sake!).

As amusing as my adventures in dating always are, it’s beginning to get on my nerves that I can only ever find arseholes and bastards when I go out. Maybe it’s my weird magnetic thing again – I can only attract arseholes! There are some people (you know who you are!) who keep claiming that I’m forever single because I’m not trying hard enough – apparently my standards are too high and I’m too picky when it comes to men!
Well no offense, but I’m trying my best to get out there and meet people, and dear god, if I lower my standards any further I might as well hang out at my local prison trying to pick up rapists and murderers!

Uugghhhh! Sorry, but just thinking about that horrible message makes me shudder. Who says that to a girl they’ve just met? Like I was gonna read it, and go “Oh how romantic, do you want to come back to my place?”

Romance is dead, and men are evil, so I’m going to start staying in more often. I may also get some cats to keep me company.
Female ones.

I do so hope that you are all living delightfully arsehole-free lives.

lots of love and a fair amount of bitterness,
Disgusted-Maya
xxx